


The Ashes of His Youth

by Timid_Timbuktu



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 14:48:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/711924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Timid_Timbuktu/pseuds/Timid_Timbuktu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miles can only run so far. Eventually the ocean will stop him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ashes of His Youth

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Shakespeare's Sonnet 73.

_**Twenty years after the blackout** _

“You’re a hard man to find.”

“And yet you always do,” Miles responded, never taking his eyes off of the ocean, unsurprised even though he hadn’t seen Bass in over nineteen months.

“That’s because you did leave a trail across the Wasteland and California, one that only I would know how to follow. Are you trying to deny that?”

Miles didn’t reply, which was his way of saying that Bass was right.

Bass took it as an invitation to sit on the beach and join him in his meditation on the sunset over the Pacific Ocean. He dug his fingers into the sand. It was soothing. He could see why Miles had decided to end his days here.

“I like your hair,” Miles said without looking at him, making Bass rub his hand over his buzz cut.

“Really?” He couldn’t believe it. Miles had always loved to lace his fingers through Bass’ blond curls. He preferred the curls too, but he needed to be less identifiable after the inevitable fall of Rome.

“Jeremy?” Miles asked, his mind apparently already on to other things, real things.

“Battle of Des Moines. I never even got to retrieve his body.”

“Tom?”

“Lost his leg outside Scranton…just two months after we lost Jason on a scouting mission. Julia was never the same. But they both made it out, went to Ontario when the Republic fell.”

Miles didn’t react beyond closing his eyes momentarily and taking a deep breath, but Bass knew how deeply the losses hit him.

“I heard about Charlie,” Bass murmured, “I’m sorry.”

That caused a tear to form at the corner of Miles’ eye, but it didn’t spill down his cheek. It hung, suspended between hope and despair, just like Miles. Bass wanted to wipe it away, to help Miles pick hope, but it wasn’t his place so he swirled his fingers through the sand instead.

The sun was almost touching the surface of the ocean when Miles finally spoke again, “It was better when nobody had electricity.”

“Yeah.”

“This state of being in between, with some people having power when others don’t, it creates imbalance. It causes destruction. I just wanted to go somewhere where there wasn’t any electricity, you know. That’s why I finally stopped here in Oregon.”

Bass gazed at the cliffs in the distance, topped by evergreen trees, pummeled by cresting waves at their base, “You could do worse. It is actually quite beautiful. I always wanted to make it out to the west coast, but well, life got in the way.”

Miles breathed out, almost a chuckle, “I thought we would be able to turn on the power for everyone, but three years seems to be my limit for believing in things that are never going to happen.”

“It’s better than being like me. I can’t seem to stop believing in things even after they are long dead.”

Bass touched Miles’ cheek lightly, unsure how he would react, relieved when Miles tilted into his touch.

“Can we believe in something different this time?”

“What would that be?” Bass asked, dropping his hand back onto the sand.

“I used to think that we needed to give Georgia power so she could defeat the Republic, but then Georgia just became another Republic. Then I thought that we needed to form a completely new country, a better one this time. You know, learn from our mistakes, but I’m not thirty anymore. I’m not in the mood to start all over again with that.”

Bass nodded as a curtain of pink descended over the orange on the horizon. Miles would turn fifty in a few months, and Bass was only two years behind him. Building another country was the last thing he wanted to do at his age, especially after how well it had gone the first time.

“Then, I thought we should take out all of the power by destroying all of the pendants, so that at least everyone would be on equal footing again. One person can’t have a nuclear weapon when someone else only has a stick.”

“It is a problem.”

“But nothing is ever equal. With or without pendants, equality is a lie.”

“Then what now?”

“Now…” Miles sighed, slowly wrapping his left hand over Bass’ right hand, “I just want to watch the sunset over the Pacific.”

“I’m sorry I interrupted that,” Bass said, not because he was sorry but because he hoped that Miles would see it for the invitation that it was. Miles’ mouth quirked into the faintest of smiles as the last sliver of the sun slid into the water.

“I forgot to say ‘with you’ at the end of that sentence, but it was there, Bass.”

Bass turned his hand under Miles and laced their fingers together, gazing at the perfect line where sea meets sky. 

It was easy to give up at the day’s end. It was easy to plan a future of hiding by the sea with each other until they were old men. But tomorrow the sun would rise over this shattered continent, and with it the part of Miles that cared so much about this world and the people in it that it overwhelmed him and spurred him into action. Bass didn’t know when that part of Miles would win again, only that it would. It always won eventually.

**Author's Note:**

> I’ll admit I wrote this last night and at lunch as therapy for 1) my Miloe feels and 2) my real life feels of missing the west coast. It helped to think of them rebuilding themselves there.
> 
> Unbeta'd.


End file.
